The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Users who submit electronic documents for printing desire the ability to confirm the status of the printing process. With the proliferation of printing technologies, users are currently able to confirm that an electronic document has been received at a printer. For instance, some operating system (OS) printing systems currently have the ability to detect the page count and file size when processing a print job and can then report this information back to the user. However, the size of an electronic document, as well as the number of pages to be printed, are not accurate indicators of how long it will take to print the document. For instance, in the case of a text document, a relatively large size document comprising many pages may process very quickly. On the other hand, in the case of images or multi-colored documents, a relatively smaller sized document with few pages may take much longer to print. Unfortunately, printing devices currently do not have the ability to report an accurate time representing how long the electronic document will take to print.
Further, in many situations, multiple users send multiple documents, ranging from pure text to large images to the same printing device. In order to organize incoming documents, printing devices usually include printing queues that are ordered first-in-first-out (FIFO), which means that electronic documents are printed or processed in the order they are received. In this scenario, a user who is submitting a text document of one page must wait until every document that was submitted beforehand to be printed. In some cases, it may be that the user must wait for an unreasonably long time for one page to print because the other documents in the queue all have long processing times.
One approach for solving this issue is allowing a user to manage the priority of the printing queue. Thus a user can change the job priority for a particular document or all documents in the queue. However, one setback of this approach is the requirement that each user must manually configure the priority of each job. Further, if each user decides to set a priority for a particular document, the problem remains unsolved.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for optimizing the printing of electronic documents.